Blessed Richard Whiting OSB and Companions (Nov 29)

The ruins of Glastonbury Abbey

In some places today is the feast of Blessed Richard Whiting and companions, martyred under Henry VIII of England.

Blessed Richard was abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, and one of the few churchman to stand up against Henry VIII's destruction of the English Church.

Blessed Richard Whiting was appointed abbot in 1525, and the first ten years of Whiting's rule were prosperous and peaceful. He was a sober and caring spiritual leader and a good manager of the abbey's day-to-day life. Contemporary accounts show that Whiting was held in very high esteem.

Attempts to find excuses to close the abbey failed, and the abbot stood in the way of its dissolution.  He was hung, drawn and quartered without proper trial along with two of his monks in 1539.

St Saturninus (November 29)

Saint Saturninus of Toulouse was, according to the early Acts of his life used by Gregory of Tours, one of the 72 disciples of Christ, and was consecrated bishop by St Peter.

According to his legend, in order to reach his church Saturninus had to pass before the capitol where there was a pagan altar.  The pagan priests ascribed the silence of their oracles to the frequent presence of Saturninus, and one day they seized him and on his unshakeable refusal to sacrifice to the images they condemned him to be tied by the feet to a bull which dragged him about the town until the rope broke.

The site, said to be "where the bull stopped" is on the rue du Taur ("Street of the Bull"). The street with the Mithraic name is one of the original Roman cross streets running straight from the Capitole now to the Romanesque basilica honoring St. Saturnin ("St Sernin").

St Sylvester OSB (Nov 26)

Saint Sylvester Gozzolini (1177 - 1267) is the founder of the Sylvestrine Congregation:

"Born of the noble family of the Gozzolini at Osimo, Marche, he was sent to study jurisprudence at Bologna and Padua, but, feeling within himself a call to the ecclesiastical state, abandoned the study of law for that of theology and Holy Scripture, giving long hours daily to prayer. On his return home we are told that his father, angered at his change of purpose, refused to speak to him for ten years. Sylvester then accepted a canonry at Osimo and devoted himself to pastoral work with such zeal as to arouse the hostility of his bishop, whom he had respectfully rebuked for the scandals caused by the prelate's irregular life.

The saint was threatened with the loss of his canonry, but decided to leave the world on seeing the decaying corpse of one who had formerly been noted for great beauty. In 1227 he retired to a desert place about thirty miles from Osimo and lived there in the utmost poverty until he was recognized by the owner of the land, a certain nobleman named Conrad, who offered him a better site for his hermitage. From this spot he was driven by damp and next established himself at Grotta Fucile, where he eventually built a monastery of his order.

In this place his penances were most severe, for he lived on raw herbs and water and slept on the bare ground. Disciples flocked to him seeking his direction, and it became necessary to choose a rule. According to the legend the various founders appeared to him in a vision, each begging him to adopt his rule. St. Sylvester chose for his followers that of St. Benedict and built his first monastery on Montefano, where, like another St. Benedict, he had first to destroy the remains of a pagan temple.

In 1247 he obtained from Innocent IV, at Lyon, a papal bull confirming his order, and before his death founded a number of monasteries."

Today the congregation has nineteen houses, eleven of them in Asia, on in Australia, one in the US, and the rest in Italy.

November 25: St Catherine of Alexandria

Saint Catherine of Alexandria (born c282), is a martyr who was a noted scholar.

The daughter of a pagan governor of Alexandria, she converted to Christianity in her teens, she visited the Roman Emperor Maxentius, and attempted to convince him to stop persecuting Christians. She succeeded in converting his wife and many pagan philosophers whom the Emperor sent to dispute with her, all of whom were subsequently martyred.  The Emperor ordered her to be imprisoned;  when the people who visited her were also converted, she was condemned to death on the breaking wheel (subsequently known as the Katherine wheel in her honour), an instrument of torture. According to legend, the wheel itself broke when she touched it, so she was beheaded.

She is one of the fourteen holy helper saints, most often invoked for protection against a sudden and unprovided-for death.  She is also patroness of philosphers and preachers.

November 24: St Chrysogonus, Martyr, Memorial

As well as St John of the Cross, today is also the memorial of St Chrysogonus, who was martyred under Diocletian at Aquileia.  A titular church in Rome, probably dating originally from the fourth century, at Trastevere, bears his name.

According to his legend (from the Catholic Encyclopedia), Chrysogonus was a functionary of the vicarius Urbis, and was the Christian teacher of Anastasia, the daughter of the noble Roman Praetextatus. Being thrown into prison during the persecution of Diocletian, he comforted by his letters the severely afflicted Anastasia. By order of Diocletian, Chrysogonus was brought before the emperor at Aquileia, condemned to death, and beheaded. His corpse, thrown into the sea, was washed ashore and buried by the aged priest, Zoilus.

November 24: SS John of the Cross Memorial

Saint John of the Cross (1542 – 1591) was a reformer of the Carmelite Order and is considered, along with Saint Teresa of Ávila, as a founder of the Discalced Carmelites. He is best known for his mystical works.

He (and St Teresa) are witnesses to the potential and difficulties of reforming an existing order from within:

On the night of 2 December 1577, John was taken prisoner by his superiors in the calced Carmelites, who had launched a counter-program against John and Teresa's reforms. John had refused an order to return to his original house, on the basis that his reform work had been approved by the Spanish Nuncio, a higher authority than John's direct superiors in the calced Carmlites. John was jailed in Toledo, where he was kept under a brutal regimen that included public lashing before the community at least weekly, and severe isolation in a tiny stifling cell barely large enough for his body. He managed to escape nine months later, on 15 August 1578, through a small window in a room adjoining his cell. (He had managed to pry the cell door off its hinges earlier that day). In the meantime, he had composed a great part of his most famous poem Spiritual Canticle during this imprisonment; his harsh sufferings and spiritual endeavours are then reflected in all of his subsequent writings. The paper was passed to him by one of the friars guarding his cell.

After returning to a normal life, he went on with the reformation and the founding of monasteries for the new Discalced Carmelite order, which he had helped found along with his fellow St. Teresa de Ávila.

He died on 14 December 1591, of erysipelas (cellulitis).

St Clement I, Pope and Martyr, Class III; St Felicity memorial (23 November)

St Clement (c96 AD) was St Peter's successor as Bishop of Rome.  His only surviving writing, a letter to the community at Corinth (which deals with a dispute over priests that had been removed from office for assorted offences) is important evidence for the primacy of the Bishop of Rome in the early Church.  It also provides an early assertion for the authority of priests in relation to the laity, a useful counter to 'congregationalism' (while also demonstrating that there are no new heresies, no new disputes in the Church; only old ones reborn...).

Reading 3 of Matins on the saint:

Clement, a Roman and disciple of blessed Peter, assigned each of the seven districts of the City to a notary who was to investigate carefully the sufferings of the Martyrs and their deeds and to write them down. He himself wrote a great deal to explain the Christian religion rightly for the salvation of others, Because he was converting many to the faith of Christ by his teaching, and the holiness of his life, he was exiled by the emperor Trajan to the wilderness near the city of Cherson across the Black Sea. There, he found two thousand Christians who had been similarly condemned by the emperor. When he had converted many nonbelievers in that region to the faith of Christ, at the command of the same emperor he was cast into the sea with an anchor tied to his neck, and won the crown of martyrdom. His body was later brought to Rome by Pope Nicholas I and honorably buried in the Church which had already been dedicated to him.

St Felicitas of Rome (c. 101 - 165) is an early martyr who was buried in the Cemetery of Maximus, on the Via Salaria on a 23 November.  She was the mother of the seven martyrs whose feast is celebrated on 10 July.